This February, for the first time, the dynamic Occulting Mask Coronagraph (OMC) testbed was placed into HCIT-1 vacuum tank to commence the work on the last, and most challenging, WFIRST system-level coronagraph milestone #9. This advanced testbed has many new features for more realistic testing of space coronagraphs:

Masks and stops for two coronagraph modes (Shaped Pupil and Hybrid Lyot) on the same testbed – similar to WFIRST flight coronagraph instrument – with mechanisms to remotely switch between these two modes,

A scaled mini-WFIRST telescope simulator with a representative obscured pupil that can produce expected on-orbit disturbances such as telescope pointing errors and thermal drifts,

A low-order wavefront sensor that uses the rejected “star” light and is capable of both sensing angstrom-level wavefront errors and controlling a fast-steering mirror, focus adjustment, and a deformable mirror to reduce these disturbances,

The WFIRST coronagraph team and the HCIT facility team have worked for over a year to design, model, build, test and integrate all the components and subsystems that went into this new high-fidelity testbed. Now the hard work of demonstrating that WFIRST coronagraph works in a simulated on-orbit environment really begins!

WFIRST is a NASA project managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center

WFIRST coronagraph instrument is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory